The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
BILLY WILDERThe best director is the one you don’t see.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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Jerry: Oh, you don’t understand, Osgood! Ehhhh… I’m a man. Osgood: Well, nobody’s perfect.
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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that’s the bunk. It’s little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.
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I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
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Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.
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Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you – you’re twenty minutes.
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Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house.
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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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I, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
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My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
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I just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.
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[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
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France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
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Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
BILLY WILDER